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The course is designed to introduce students longstanding problems in philosophy through engagement with selected texts, both historical and contemporary. Problems include the limits of human understanding, whether or not humans are fundamentally self-interested, and other perennial philosophical problems. The goal is to critically assess answers offered to these types of problems.
John L. Austin was one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century. This book is a collection of lectures presenting Austin’s conclusions in the field to which he directed his main efforts on a wide variety of philosophical problems. For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin’s original lecture notes, emending the printed text where it seemed necessary. An appendix contains literal transcriptions of a number of marginal notes made by Austin but not included in the text. Comparison of the text with these annotations provides new dimensions to the study of Austin’s work.
This book, by the British philosopher A.J. Ayer, published in 1936, is an excellent summary and defense of logical positivism. Ayer argued that factual positions were only meaning ful if they could be verified by direct experience, and thus that metaphysical talk about God, the cosmos, or a “transcendent reality” was not merely, as earlier empiricists had maintained, excessively conjectural but literally meaningless. Aside from verificationism, Ayer also devoted a chapter of his work to his own theory of emotivism, according to which statements of moral evaluation, because they are unverifiable, are not descriptions of fact but merely “emotive” expressions of positive or negative feelings.
In this book, Bertrand Russell introduces the key theories of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, David Hume, John Locke, Immanuel Kant, Georg Hegel, and others to discuss the problems of philosophy. Topics discussed include appearance and reality; the existence of matter; the nature of matter; idealism; knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description; induction; knowledge of general principles; how a priori knowledge is possible; the world of universals; our knowledge of universals; intuitive knowledge; truth and falsehood; knowledge, error, and probable opinion; the limits of philosophical knowledge; and the value of philosophy.
This book, by the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Roety, is a survey of some developments in philosophy, especially analytic philosophy, from the point of view of the anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian revolution. Both the philosophy of mind and epistemology are discussed in this book. Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation: comparing the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. Rorty claimed that the Cartesian demand for certain knowledge of an objectively existing world through representative ideas is a holdover from the mistaken quest for God.
This book, by the American philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt, is a collection of thirteen seminal essays on ethics, free will, and the philosophy mind. The essays deal with such central topics as freedom of the will, moral responsibility, the concept of a person, the structure of the will, the nature of action, the constitution of the self, and the theory of personal ideals. By focusing on the distinctive nature of human freedom, Frankfurt is able to explore fundamental problems of what it is to be a person and of what one should care about in life.
This book by the great German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche is claimed to be "the most personal of all my books," whose philosophical themes were most central to Nietzsche’s own thought. It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God -- to which a large part of the book is devoted -- and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence. Other themes covered include the problem of nihilism, the role of truth, falsity and the will-to-truth in human life, and the question of the proper attitude to adopt toward human suffering and toward human achievement.
This book elucidates important philosophical issues, especially those concerning the nature of reality. It offers a general survey of philosophy by illustrating how philosophy is a practical tool for understanding science, reason, the laws of nature, relativism, Darwinism, the human brain and mind, isolates the presuppositions of modern science, and conducts a focused attack on materialism and relativism. The book is aimed at stimulating thought and argument, rather than presenting a bland survey of possible positions, based on the consideration that readers should be prepared to think things out in a disciplined way instead of simply finding out what others think.
